Speaking of Vikings ...

... they have apparently decided to give up on the Incas and go raiding on the Irish again. Some folks have build the Sea Stallion, a replica of a Viking longship, and they plan to launch it later today on a 1000 nautical mile trip from Roskilde to Dublin. The website looks pretty basic at first, but it has some neat stuff, such as the ability to follow the progress of the Sea Stallion on a map. You can also watch a video with English narration, but it's a little slow-loading. And, as if it weren't super-cool-awesome enough to be sailing around in a Viking longship, this woman will be going with them. Lumberjacks, blacksmiths, tar-makers, and one really cute biologist ... if a person could literally die from envy, I'd be in serious danger.

On a personal tangent, when I was in high school my great aunt gave me a book called The Sinbad Voyage, about a fellow who built a replica of the type of ship contemporary with the Sinbad myth, and sailed it around the various places found in the mythology. I let that book gather dust for a year or two, because it didn't seem too interesting when the first chapter was about fundraising and such. When I picked it up out of boredom later, though, I found it fascinating -- very cool, very educated, and very macho. I remember seeing the picture of these Sinbad-geeks passing around AK-47s for target practice in case they got attacked by (real) pirates, and I thought that was absolutely the coolest thing ever. Heck, I still think it's absolutely the coolest thing ever.

The only question remaining regarding the Viking voyage is this: Will the value of the Lloyd's Bank turd be diminished by the collective dookies of the Sea Stallion's crew?

h/t Muhlberger's Early History